The Future of Meetings + Events

A lot of next-generation meeting trends and general lifestyle travel trends seem to be emerging in 2016. As we covered this week, Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt are delivering new and newly renovated hotels later this year that you actually want to hang out in for extended networking. Sure, W Hotels was promoting the whole social hub and living room lobby vibe a decade ago, but now you can see the trend going mainstream.

Airbnb is slowly becoming a serious conversation in the meetings industry. We’re collaborating with the IMEX team to create another panel on the impact of the sharing economy on events for IMEX America this fall, following up on the first session at IMEX Frankfurt in April. Check out the story below with six female executives talking about their experiences with Airbnb while traveling solo to conferences.

C2 Montreal kicked off yesterday with its usual hardcore energy celebrating the marriage of creativity and commerce. The event has radically shifted the perception of conference user experience design in its five short years of operation. It’s also becoming a huge wake-up call for the established members of the meetings industry to get over their tech fears.

Meetings are cool. Pushing creativity and connectivity to the next level at events to drive commerce is a beautiful thing. C2’s message should be the message for the entire meetings industry moving forward.

— Greg Oates, Senior Editor

Social Quote of the Day

Travel + Hospitality

Solo Female Business Travelers Share Their Feelings About Airbnb: Airbnb is about experiencing the destination on your own terms. It’s about freedom, personalization, choice, and self-determination, but it also requires a degree of flexibility and independence on the part of the individual traveler. That very lack of structure is what causes concerns among many females traveling alone to business meetings and conferences. Read more at Skift

Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton Are Shedding Their Dated Design Legacies: JW Marriott in Austin, Marriott Marquis in Houston, Hilton in Cleveland, and Hyatt San Francisco are completely reinventing the corporate hospitality environment in terms of design and user experience, and they’re all major conference hotels, too. Read more at Skift

Skift CMO Interviews: Dallas Tourism Redefines Its Image Around Local and Luxury: Noelle LeVeaux, CMO of Visit Dallas, explains how the city is rebranding itself with a smart new website and a repositioning mission highlighting the local neighborhoods and approachable luxury lifestyle vibe. Read more at Skift

Next Generation Event UX

The French Conference That’s Testing the Limits of Modern Event Design: The new Dive:Event conference could be a catalyst to shift the conversation around human/tech integration and the evolution of user experience design in our personal and professional lives. Keep an eye on this one. Read more at Skift

C2 Montreal Kicks Off With Cannes Lions’ Content Director Speaking About the Power of Creativity to Drive Business: The coolest conference you’ve never been to kicked off yesterday, themed around the mashup of creativity and commerce. Read more at Campaign US.

Ideas and Energy Collide at Collision in New Orleans: Check out behind the scenes at the fast-growing Collision technology conference, which this year moved from Las Vegas to New Orleans, to learn about the startups, investors, heat maps, Jazz Fest, and pub crawls. Read more at Convene

The 10 Biggest Announcements From Google I/O 2016: Google now has a mobile virtual reality platform called “Daydream,” built on top of Android N. Google also showed off a reference design for a smartphone-powered VR headset that looks a lot like a smaller, cordless Oculus Rift. Read more at The Verge

8 Reasons Why Festivals Can Transform Your Life: Airbnb’s Chip Conley says: “Festivals are as old as humanity, but in the digital era there’s a new peak in the magnetic attraction to extraordinary human gatherings. There’s an immediacy available when we put down our smart phones and dive into the present moment.” Read more on Medium

In Its Third Year, New York Magazine’s Vulture Festival Is Bigger Than Ever: The success of Vulture revolves around the event’s ability to develop a stable of sponsors and a direct funnel to connect with cultured Millennials. Read more at AdAge

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The Skift Meetings Innovation Report is curated by Skift senior editor Greg Oates [go@skift.com]. The newsletter is emailed every Wednesday.